Why Pregnancy and Baby Guides are Crap.

When you are pregnant there are lots of online guides you can sign up to for weekly updates on your unborn child filled with useless information

‘ Your baby is the size of a pea and can move it’s fingers. You will be feeling tired and achy.’

No shit Sherlock.

Pregnant women don’t need to be kept awake at night imagining pea babies in their tummies flipping the bird. What we really want science to discover is the exact moment a pregnant woman looks pregnant. This is useful to us.

With all this in mind I have developed

The Eeh Bah Mum Guide to Pregnancy.

Available in no good shops. Or bad ones. In fact it’s free:

First Trimester: You look fat and feel grumpy. When you throw up on your journey into work people think it’s because you are hungover.

Second Trimester: You look fat and feel grumpy.

Third Trimester: Congratulations! You now look pregnant and have an excuse for feeling grumpy. Random strangers will start touching you, guessing the sex of your unborn child and telling you dreadful birth stories.

Think that just about covers it. Subscribe to my blog for more insightful updates like this. Or check out my useful parenting stuff.

The next step is of course early years development where parents are bombarded with lots of information about what your baby ‘should’ be doing and when.

Yet again all the important stuff is missing . I don’t need to know that my child ‘should’ be able to use a knife and fork.

I ‘should’ be able to reverse park my car. I cannot.

Here are some more useful questions parents need the answers to:

When will my child open the toilet door in a busy cafe while I’m on the loo?

At what age will my child first open and drink a bottle of shampoo?

How long can a baby be left in a high chair before they start throwing food around?

When do babies reach peak cuteness?

This last one is important. I’d much rather know that I should be making the most of every last gurgle instead of worrying about why my child refuses to take an interest in putting shapes in the correct holes (Unless filling my bra with raisins counts?).

Even though it was established beyond all plausible doubt by total strangers commenting on the Internet that, yes, my son is a dick I felt bad (and not just because I had a dick for a son).

Mother’s guilt kicked in hard and I have decided to redress the karmic balance between my son and the Internet and announce that although my son is still very much a dick at 19 months he has hit peak cuteness.

He will never be this cute again. As far as cuteness goes it’s all downhill from here.

(Does that make up for calling him a dick? Who cares according to the guides he won’t be able to read for at least another 4 years. The Internet will probably be shut by then.)

Just wanted to say thanks for this – a perfectly timed dose of reality for me as I spent most of yesterday evening worrying about the fact that my five month old refuses to bounce in her Jumperoo! I can’t reverse park either…

Oh yes!!! I absolutely love this post, particularly the very last tongue-in-cheek line I wrote a post recently about this very topic and I won’t spam you with the link but let’s just say that I got a lot off my chest…